The Smart Dominos Turnaround in Social Media

Crispin, Porter and Bogusky have created another great campaign. This time it is for Dominos, “the Dominos Turnaround”. There are 3 amazing lessons from this related to how Social Media is changing marketing communications and how brands relate to their consumers:

1. The insights for the campaign came from reading commentary in social media toward the pizza. It sucked and the crust was even compared to cardboard. They decided to create the campaign around how the company listened to its consumers and then significantly reformulated the ingredients and improved the taste.

2. The online and TV advertising directed consumers to the full story on YouTube. It’s essentially a well-produced 4:21 commercial positioned as a documentary. Here it is:

3. The video uses real language, shows real people at Dominos and from focus groups. Importantly, it is not afraid to deprecate the previous recipe. This was unheard of in the older advertising days: To admit your pizza tasted like “cardboard” or that your detergent didn’t whiten really well. But, we are entering an era when the consumer actively blogs and expresses their real opinions about brands freely. Crispin/ Domino is smart to play on this and build relationships with “integrity”. It also helps to magnify the importance of the upgrade; helping bring back users and attract new ones.

Having said this, the product had better live up to the new claims. If you read the comments on YouTube you will see that some people love the upgrade and some don’t buy into it.

In the end, the old rules still apply. That is, the consumer rules and determines the success of the move with their wallets. Let’s see what happens.